Generative Artificial Intelligence and the Editing of Academic Essays: Necessary and Sufficient Ethical Judgments in Its Use by Higher Education Students

Abstract

The emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) has significantly transformed higher education. As a linguistic assistant, GAI can promote equity and reduce barriers in academic writing. However, its widespread availability also raises ethical dilemmas about integrity, fairness, and skill development. Despite the growing debate, empirical evidence on how students’ ethical evaluations influence their predicted use of GAI in academic tasks remains scarce. This study analyzes the ethical determinants of students’ determination to use GAI as a linguistic assistant in essay writing. Based on the Multidimensional Ethics Scale (MES), the model incorporates four ethical criteria: moral equity, moral relativism, consequentialism, and deontology. Data were collected from a sample of 151 university students. For the analysis, we used a mix of partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM), aimed at testing sufficiency relationships, and necessary condition analysis (NCA), to identify minimum acceptance thresholds or necessary conditions. The PLS-SEM results show that only consequentialism is statistically relevant in explaining the predicted use. Moreover, the NCA reveals that reaching a minimum degree in the evaluations of all ethical constructs is necessary for use to occur. While the necessary condition effect size of moral equity and consequentialism is high, that of relativism and deontology is moderate. Thus, although acceptance of GAI use in the analyzed context increases only when its consequences are perceived as more favorable, for such use to occur it must be considered acceptable, which requires surpassing certain thresholds in all the ethical factors proposed as explanatory.

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